Posted 14 October 2009 - 03:26 PM

Me too, I searched for hours with many suggestions and solutions but you're the only spot I've seen mention the MachineID.plist and that's all I was missing.

Now it's backing up fine. As was said it requires me to have the SMB share mounted (say /Volumes/backups), but always creates a /Volumes/backups-1 with root permissions and opens the .dmg volume from there. Odd but fine.

One remaining issue/mention, I'm not sure if it's just SMB related or you AFP users have the same problem, if you 'Enter Time Machine' and look at your backups, when you close that it does not seem to eject the DMG.

So if I 'Enter Time Machine' it creates the /Volumes/backups-1 mount, open the DMG and starts browsing, when I'm done I still have my DMG opened (/Volumes/NAS Backup but whatever you called your DMG image name in the manual step).

Now if it attempts to backup it'll create a /Volumes/backups-2 and will complain that the DMG is already in use and it stop backing up. I've always right-click ejected my DMG and 'umount /Volumes/backups-1' after 'Enter Time Machine' to keep it backing up happy. Anyone else had this issue?

One more I'll mention, but I think it's just my particular system/config, my 'Enter Time Machine' does not refresh correctly, I see no star field, just one Finder/browser window and if I click in the correct (bottom, right) area where the forward/back arrows are for going through the archives then it will update that Finder window with whatever historic version I want, but it won't draw the date or arrows or any of the normal Time Machine background. I'm assuming it's video driver related but thought I'd throw it out there in case others have the same issue.

Again, THANKS for this fix, I'm very happy to be backing up to RAID5 and not to an Airport Extreme.

Posted 14 October 2009 - 04:35 PM

waj

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Thanks, Sunkid! Last night, I had almost given up for the day after reading other people's stories and instructions (even those supposedly for Snow Leopard) with nothing to show for it but a lot of sparsebundles in the Trash. For what it's worth, I hit a few extra speed bumps along the way that I would like to share in case anyone else is in the same boat. I'll probably specify more than is relevant, just because that's the way I am.

To get this working, I had to: 1. Remove all stored credentials for the server from my keychain (tried this after reading http://forums.macrum...d.php?t=774097) 2. Authenticate to the server using an account local to that system. I had been using my domain credentials (e.g. "MYDOMAIN\username") to connect, and though that works fine for regular mounting, Time Machine didn't like it. Here are the relevant entries from system.log (last failure and first success):

3. Run sunkid's script as root (e.g. using sudo). Even after the above messages, it would still appear to start the backup, then time out with another error (sorry, can't find that one in the log to quote), until I did this.

One everything was working on the crappy Dell, I just moved the drive to my girlfriend's shiny fast 24" Aluminum iMac, on which she is running Windows 7. [side note: It's not as crazy as it sounds; Star Wars Galaxies and EQII are the most important apps to her and they just don't run that well in a VirtualBox VM!]

Anyway, I then shared the TimeMachine folder on that system, mounted it on the MBP (again, not saving the credentials), switched target disks in Time Machine, removed everything from the Time Machine exclusion list, and got about 100GB backed up to it overnight before I packed up the MBP to head to work.

Posted 17 October 2009 - 09:11 PM

Posted 18 October 2009 - 01:52 PM

gilesrowland

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Thanks so much for this. Fingers crossed working nicely for me now.

Apple are real f***ers, breaking/disabling this in 10.6. I'm sure it's to sell more of their TimeCapsules. I might have bought one, had recent reports shown them as only lasting around 17 months. That's not much good for a backup solution! I am backing up to an old iBook (> 6 years) with a Drobo attached - my home server.

One important thing I learned from all the threads on this topic is that if you are backing up to a Mac OS machine running anything older than Leopard, you need to mount the backup share with SMB not AFP. For some reason TimeMachine is not able to keep AFP shares before Leopard mounted for backup. I have SharePoints on the iBook host an SMB share for the TimeMachine backups.

Posted 22 October 2009 - 10:58 AM

Posted 22 October 2009 - 11:09 PM

John Biesi

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I would like to thank everyone for the article and helpful pointers. The "manual method" was by far the easiest and most efficient approach that I tried.

I do want to point out one thing to people who are experiencing issues... Most of my issues seemed to be related to file permissions. I received the following errors on my first attempt (no names have been changed, as I'm not innocent):

Fortunately, I was able to perform a simple Drag and Drop copy with Finder and Time Machine is currently working! (I will re-post if it doesn't work after I reboot). I would love to delve deeper into why that worked when the all powerful command line failed, but my busy life won't allow me the time.

For completeness, my configuration consists of Snow Leopard (10.6.1) on a MacbookPro4,1 and a network SMB share on an OpenFiler server. The SMB credential is my personal Active Directory login (ie. <DOMAIN>\<user>), and I verified in Keychain Access that the credential is identical on both the "login" and "System" keychains.

A final word... Backups are only good if you have the ability to restore from them. I have no doubt that restore a single file should be a snap with Time Machine using a NAS, however I have yet to see anyone claim they have done a full system restore from a sparsebundle on a NAS. I prey that I won't have to hack together a solution for that, but finding some evidence of it being done would put my mind at ease.

Thanks so much for this. Fingers crossed working nicely for me now.

Apple are real f***ers, breaking/disabling this in 10.6. I'm sure it's to sell more of their TimeCapsules. I might have bought one, had recent reports shown them as only lasting around 17 months. That's not much good for a backup solution! I am backing up to an old iBook (> 6 years) with a Drobo attached - my home server.

One important thing I learned from all the threads on this topic is that if you are backing up to a Mac OS machine running anything older than Leopard, you need to mount the backup share with SMB not AFP. For some reason TimeMachine is not able to keep AFP shares before Leopard mounted for backup. I have SharePoints on the iBook host an SMB share for the TimeMachine backups.

With respect to TimeCapsules breaking down after 17 months, that's exactly my experience. The power supply got flakey one day and then complete gone the next. I found some very helpful forums because Apple was completely unsympathetic, but ultimately decided to go the standard NAS direction so I can put some more sophisticated network hardware in at home.

Posted 23 October 2009 - 02:55 AM

dopey423

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can someone please help me? i have done the manual process and cannot get time machine to recognize the new sparsebundle. My computer's share name is "iMac" and everytime i try and backup, time machine keeps creating a sparsebundle called, "iMac 1.tmp.sparsebundle"

i cannot get this working for the life of me.

please help!

i mounted the iMac.sparsebundle volume to the computer to drag/drop the .com plist file.... this is the code i have inside of it

Posted 23 October 2009 - 03:00 AM

sunkid

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41 posts

<snip>i mounted the iMac.sparsebundle volume to the computer to drag/drop the .com plist file</snip>

Therein lies your problem! Don't mount the sparsebundle but copy the plist file into the sparsebundle directory using terminal or by selecting "Show package contents" in the Finder's contextual menu (not sure if the second option is available).

Posted 24 October 2009 - 02:01 AM

rbonon

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50 posts

Location:Brazil

Hello,

Not being able to use the sparsebundle created. Here is what I did:

- My scenario: running 10.6.1 trying to do TM backups to a Linux SAMBA file share
- I run the script to create the sparsebundle locally in the Hackintosh
- I used the cp -fvr command to copy the sparsebundle directory to the SMB share (got some chflags warnings, I suppose related to the fact that there are no Permissions to be unsupported on SMB shares
- I was able to mount the sparsebundle, and see it as a mounted volume in Finder
- Opened Time Machine and could not see the mounted sparebundle volume as one of the available options for backup.

What am I missing? I tried running
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
but that only showed my SMB shares.

Posted 24 October 2009 - 06:05 PM

hagfish

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14 posts

Can someone tell me if this is normal? Got everything working and I'm in the middle of my first backup now.. Is it normal for TM to still report the full size of my NAS? Its saying that I have over 2 TB available for backup!! The sparsebundle I created is only 250 gb. Is this something that will fix itself and report correctly after the first backup or did I miss something? Thanks

edit: first full backup done and its still reporting over 2 tb available... this normal?

Posted 25 October 2009 - 11:10 PM

Posted 26 October 2009 - 04:07 PM

bm28

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6 posts

Although the file name i created is called 'bm28's Macbook.sparsebundle' the one Time Machine tries to create is called 'bm28's Macbook.tmp.sparsebundle' I hav tried even changing the name to reflect this but TM still tries to create it.
I have tried everthing shown above and still have difficulty. Has anyone had this problem, if so any suggestions?

Just to make sure I'm doing this right, how do you copy the plist file into the sparsebundle's image directory?

Posted 29 October 2009 - 03:29 PM

themage

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HI- First of all thanks a lot for the instruction - I have managed to create the sparsebundle and transferred to my NAS ( QNAP 119) and time machine also recognises it . When I start the back up, as it is the first time I am doing it , I decided to connect to my NAS through the firewire cable.However it is taking too long while the first few 1-2 gb are transferred fine the system hangup after that and I get the irritating beach ball. the only way I can get back to my system is through emergency shutdown by holding the power key down and reboot. Can anyone help please.

The NAS drive is formatted as EXT3 and I am using snow leopard and have also stopped spotlight form indexing the TM backup.